Over the past decade, contemporary artist Rachel Sussman has travelled the world to document some of the world's oldest living things. The result is a collection of dramatic and poignant photographs that reveal the living history of our planet. They are a celebration of the past, a call to action in the present, and a barometer of the future.

The catalyst for this project was an unexpected hiking trip in 2004 to seek out a 7,000-year-old tree buried deep in the remote Japanese island of Yakushima. At the time Sussman was travelling Japan "with no agenda other than to make photographs exploring the tenuous relationship between humans and nature".

Inspired by the "the quiet beauty and power of the ancient Japanese cedar", Sussman gathered a team of scientists and biologists to seek out the world's most resilient species. Her criteria for such 'resilience' were that the organisms must be 'continuously living' and that it must have been alive for 2,000 years or more. For ten years the team documented 30 organisms growing in some of the world's harshest climates, from Antarctica to Greenland, and from the Mojave Desert to the Australian Outback.

The final collection of photos present "windows on what the world must have once been, producing pangs of pain - nostalgia for something devastatingly, unimaginably beautiful that is lost forever into the deep past - coupled with hope that we still might repair some of the damage we've done".

All 30 organisms documented in this project are reproduced in The Oldest Living Things in the World, published by University of Chicago Press.